A blindsided American’s road movie about his country’s discontent

The brokerage firm’s slogan, “Merrill Lynch is bullish on America,” lives on in memory although Merrill Lynch itself was absorbed during the Great Recession.

Although officially over, the recession has left lasting wounds — yes, in income levels and 401K plans, but most of all in Americans’ expectations and the nation’s historic bullish optimism that things will get better.

According to an MSNBC/Wall Street Journal poll, released earlier this month, 71 percent of Americans believe their country is on the wrong track. Sixty percent say America is in a state of decline. A staggering 76 percent lack confidence that their children will enjoy a better life than they.

The Great Recession — literally — dislodged Patrick Lovell from his life. He had been senior producer of the syndicated TV program “Home Team,” only to find the program canceled and himself facing foreclosure.

The answer for Lovell was classically American — the road trip. He set out to explore what had happened.

Lovell has produced a very personal — or “vewy personal” as Barbara Walters would call it — flick called “Forward 13: Waking Up the American Dream.” Its moniker: “The mortgage crisis made personal.”

The travels took Lovell across an apprehensive country, waking up to the cost of economic injustice, in the midst of a “recovery” in which the wealthy are getting the uranium mine while many former middle class Americans get the shaft.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is above 17,000 — more than double where it was in the spring of 2009 — and the economy is creating more than 200,000 jobs a month. But family income and net worth have not recovered. The political system is in paralysis, with an opposition party in Congress working to thwart everything the President proposes.

The Occupy Wall Street movement collapsed in its own ditsy behavior, but deep discontent remains.

Patrick Lovell will show “Forward 13: Waking Up the American Dream” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 2 in the SIFF Uptown Theater, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N. He will be around to talk about the experience that changed his life and that of millions of other Americans.

The 97-minute flick won’t make you laugh like the old, escapist “road movies” of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, but it will make you think.